I lose my nerve sometimes

So, I posted a couple of things on the super-heavy topics of rape and terrorism… then I lost my nerve. I don’t know why, I just did. I still have a backlog of completed posts to upload, but everything I’d written seemed wrong in some indefinable way, and I didn’t know how to make it right again, so I stopped.

Maybe it was getting a comment from someone I don’t know (deleted on sight for pure dickheadery). It’s always unnerving to get a reminder that anybody’s reading this. But I think it was just general anxiety. Every now and then the daily business of my life just strikes me as frightening, so frightening I worry I won’t get through it.

Cycling in traffic, making phone calls, organising events, writing blog posts, doing my paid work to deadline… sometimes it’s all just terrifying. There’s no scale to it. The supposedly-scary stuff like public speaking on an unfamiliar topic – that’s no more frightening than the idea of ringing up to book a haircut. So I just push on through all of it. And when the anxiety lifts, I can laugh at it. I can pick up the magazine I was reading the day before and wonder why the recipe for cinnamon pinwheels was so worrying that I had to put the magazine down. (Yes, I read women’s magazines. What of it?)

Sometimes I wonder: if the stuff I do makes me so anxious, maybe I’m doing the wrong stuff. Other times I think: if I can get through this stuff just fine despite the anxiety, why can’t I just lose the anxiety? I don’t know.

I do things in an attempt to manage it. I do yoga. I keep my house fairly tidy, because mess stresses me out. I follow a productivity system which has reassurance-that-you’re-not-forgetting-stuff built in to it. I try to get enough exercise and sleep and healthy food. I do these things half-arsedly, but I do them. And if none of them work – well, wouldn’t it be terrible if I was more organised, with a tidy house and better health, for nothing?

So that’s what’s going on with me. Soon I’ll snap back in to “normal” mode and you can expect the usual 1000-word rants on earliness or acronyms or whatever the hell it is I normally talk about.